Lenses

All his hands are in flower form. But still he sinks. - uh, me, actually. written yesterday.

Welcome to the new year. Feels a lot like the old year, if you ask me. Knee still hurts. Back still messed up (and I'm an hour late for taking my Naproxen so I'm feelin' it).

This was my first cup of coffee of the new year, and it looked so fetching that I took a picture of it. I then decided that taking pictures was what I wanted to do with my remaining daylight, so Nikon and I went for a nice walk together.

I mean, it was cold, and I just missed Golden Hour, so the light was fading fast, and my back hurt just carrying that little camera, but still and all it was good to get out and look and think.

I realized, as I was walking along, that I don't get into those deep thought processes when I'm riding my bike, which is weird at first glance, because you'd think there'd be something meditative about all that pedal-turning. And there is.

It just doesn't bring on thoughts about much else other than the bike itself. And the meditative bit only happens at night, when I start to focus on the sounds of motion.

Of course, there's a very good reason for this - during the day, or earlier evening, the streets are a very real, and deadly, videogame. And if my mind were wandering away from me even a tiny bit, I'd be paint on somebody's bumper. You need your wits about you in this joint.

I watch, sometimes, one of my faster, more nimble friends threading his or her way through traffic and am amazed at the physics of it. In the spectrum of cyclists, I am quite cautious, and lately, very slow.

When I was less injured and it was warmer out (knees like warmer), I had gotten a bit faster, and I remember going for a ride with one of my friends with whom I hadn't ridden in a long time, and he, after turning to wait for me and finding that I'd kept up, exclaimed, "Hey, you got fast! I turned to see where you were, and you were right there. That's so cool."

And it was such a happy, perfect moment.

I hadn't even realized what a good, good summer I had until it was gone. And now, I am not sure of course, but I suspect I am having kind of a bad winter, with one thing and another.

Funny how you can never see just where you are when you are in it. As if we've always just come up from underground and stand here, blindly looking around, trying to get our bearings.

Wow. Didn't mean to be a downer today; that just seems to be where the stream led.

Enjoy the pics anyway. I think the blog's been a bit Nikon-starved for a while.